Introduction to OSF Web Services

Web Services

Introduction

The Open Semantic Framework (OSF) Web services
provide a uniform and platform-independent means for accessing and
exposing all of the semantic technology capabilities of OSF via
structured RDF
(Resource Description Framework) data. The central organizing
perspective of these services is that of the dataset. These
datasets contain instance records, with the structural
relationships amongst the data and their attributes and concepts
defined via ontologies (schema with accompanying vocabularies).

The OSF Web services are generally RESTful in design and are based
on HTTP and Web protocols and open standards. There are presently
27 Web services in the framework covering functionality in CRUD,
revisioning, search, tagging, ontology management, and export and
import. All Web services are exposed via APIs and SPARQL endpoints.
Each request to an individual Web service returns an HTTP status
and optionally a document of resultsets. Each results document can
be serialized in many ways, and may be expressed as either RDF,
pure XML, JSON, or different flavors of irON.

The OSF Web services have direct interfaces to the underlying
engines used by OSF, including the Virtuoso RDF triple store (via
ODBC and HTTP), the Solr faceted, full-text search engine (via
HTTP), the OWLAPI and the Gate NLP framework. However, the OSF Web
Services have been designed to be fully platform-independent. Their
design also allows other specialized systems to be included, such
as analysis or advanced inference engines.

The OSF Web services are open source (Apache 2 license) and
designed for extensibility. The OSF Web services and their
extensions and enhancements are fully documented on the OSF wiki.

OSF

The Open Semantic Framework (OSF) is an integrated software
stack using open-source semantic technologies for knowledge
management.